Melissa Checker Interviews Rappaport 2015 Finalist Davide Orsini

1) What brought you to your research subject? How did you come to discover the topic?

I was admitted to the Anthropology and History Program at the University of Michigan with a research project about the impact of U.S. military bases on local communities in Italy. In the summer of 2009—during my first preliminary research trip to Italy—I decided to start from the Archipelago of La Maddalena, where in 1972 the U.S. Navy installed a base for nuclear submarines. The base was closed in February 2008 but I was expecting to find a strong local opposition to the American presence still in place. Instead, I found that many Maddalenini regretted the departure of the U.S. Navy due to the economic benefits of the installation and a sense of local identity forged around the Archipelago’s long military legacy. In some sense, the presence of the U.S. base was perceived as a “natural” continuation of the Archipelago’s role as a maritime fortress strategically positioned in the hearth of the Tyrrhenian Sea. For this reason limited local opposition focused primarily on the risks of contamination related to the presence and operations of the nuclear submarines, which were propelled by nuclear reactors. Both the Italian government and the U.S. Navy claimed sort of exceptional status for the nuclear submarines, treating them as absolutely safe technological artifacts. Only the opposition of several Italian experts (nuclear physicists, health physicists, and radioecologists) and environmental activists pushed the Italian government to institute environmental monitoring, after years of study and organization. My dissertation focused on this story to explore the relationship between national sovereignty, scientific knowledge production, and citizenship in the geopolitical context of the Mediterranean area after World War Two.

2) Can you share a bit about your research methods and timeline for this project? What was the most difficult aspect of your research? What was the most satisfying aspect?

La Maddalena is different from a classic U.S. “fleet town,” in the sense that U.S. personnel lived in close contact with the local residents, and they were fully integrated into the social life of the community. The most difficult part of my research was at the beginning, when I had to figure out how the local community and the Italian expert agencies dealt with environmental risk. I first had to make sense of the local narratives about the U.S. Navy presence and connect those to the processes of local historical production (still strong) that influenced the perception of the U.S. base as beneficial (or not harmful). Then I had to dig deeper and find out about the environmental monitoring program thanks to local journalists and some local historians who directed me towards archival sources that I would not have known about except for my daily conversations with local activists and intellectuals. Once I figured out what sources were available, I next went around Italy to find the Italian experts (most of them retired now) who participated in the environmental monitoring of the Archipelago in the 1970s and in the 1980s. This also involved digging deeper into the history of the Italian nuclear program, which the Italian government interrupted in 1987. The archives of the former Italian Committee for Nuclear Energy are scattered across Italy and sometimes completely abandoned. Only with the help of some experts, who gave me access to their personal archives, could I reconstruct the history of the Italian radioprotection program during the Cold War. This has been also the most exciting aspect of my research. I was not interested in replicating the institutional history of the Italian nuclear program. I wanted to explore Italian nuclear experts and local communities’ daily interactions around nuclear sites where radioprotection programs were implemented. I think that the combination of archival work, oral history, and my ethnographic experience in La Maddalena gave me the possibility to shape my project in unique ways. So, the method was—I like to think—truly interdisciplinary. Thanks to the fact that Italian is my native language, I could complete my fieldwork in a couple of years.
3) Your paper challenges the way many academics currently view risk perception. Can you say more about the significance of your research in that regard? For example, are you making a larger comment to the discipline about understandings of risk, or do you see events in your site as unique? (You can say more about your thinking in your last paragraph if that helps).

I am definitely trying to make a general contribution to the understanding of expert and non-expert assessments of risk. As you may notice, I am reluctant to use “perception,” because I think that the word has many political implications, which I deem negative. The genealogy of “risk perception” as a concept for understanding the role of the public in sociotechnical controversies has its roots in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Psychometric analyses of “risk perceptions” tended to draw stark lines between non-expert understandings of risk and “scientific”, rational, and expert understandings of it. In order to dismantle the simplistic view of the public uptake of science, which frames public opposition to technological risks in terms of “knowledge deficit,” some scholars demonstrate how local knowledge contributes to the discovery and solution of environmental and public health problems. Brian Wynne, and others (including Mary Douglas) began challenging this normative, I would say technocratic, view of risk starting in the 1980s. However, these alternative models, with a few exceptions, continue to assume inherent epistemic divides between experts and non-experts. While I am completely on board with this research program, instead of assuming lay/expert epistemic divides in all contexts, I believe we should study how lay/expert categories are complex and internally fragmented, and how they come to objectify and represent risk in the first place. Thus, the first question is: how do both experts and non-experts identify and understand environmental risks? My argument is that they both rely on material signs (environmental changes, unprecedented events) to articulate and objectify risk. From this point of view I wanted to dethrone “nuclear risk” from the exceptional status that many scholars seem to assign to it, given its invisibility/imperceptibility (see, for example, Masco 2006). Second, even within the same community, ideas of risk are not fixed: they change over time according to those material signs through which risk is objectified. But before being represented and publicly deployed in sociotechnical arenas, understandings of risk need to be assembled and made coherent. We know a lot about experts’ efforts to achieve coherence before science is “on stage” (Hilgartner 2000) but we tend to overlook the internal political struggles going on inside the activist side, probably because we see environmental justice activism as equalitarian and non-hierarchical (activists we get to know through the literature usually fight against powerful groups of scientists, corporations, the military, the state). Also, I would say that this is due to the fact that the overwhelming majority of environmental justice studies in the field of Science and Technology Studies comes from the U.S. and the U.K. (Ottinger and Cohen 2011). But in my case, analyzing the politics of nuclear risk’s objectification and representation in Cold War Italy involved dealing with structured and organized party organizations like the Italian Communist Party and other institutions, like the Catholic Church, in which the role of local and national elites was extremely important. They organized political campaigns and assembled the content of technopolitical arguments, often hierarchically, with a great attention paid to the control of information.

4) Relatedly, can you speak a bit more to the way you see your work articulating with ongoing critiques of “the risk society” or about nuclear energy?

Because internal dynamics, ideas, and assumptions about science, technology, risk, etc vary so widely, I find it difficult to apply broad sociological models like Beck’s “risk society” (Beck, 1992). That said, I find Beck’s analysis very useful for thinking about the unequal distribution of risks and about the exclusion of underrepresented and disadvantaged sectors of the population from research programs, and epidemiological and environmental studies: what David Hess calls “undone science.” (Hess 2007). In addition, post-Chernobyl and post-Fukushima pro-nuclear narratives tend to absolve “the technology” and blame it on the poor safety standards of the “Soviet industry,” on “natural disasters,” or on the “Japanese culture” of acquiescence to hierarchy and complicity with the industrial sector (See Schmid 2015; Hamblin 2012). My own conversations with nuclear regulators and safety experts highlighted the degree to which the nuclear industry has yet to address and/or resolve structural issues about safety, liability, emergency response, labor, and the pressing problem of nuclear decommissioning and waste disposal. Thus, proponents of a “nuclear renaissance” tend to represent nuclear energy, simplistically, as an available solution without discussing all the “open” problems mentioned above. So, the problem is understanding what is at stake with nuclear vs. renewable sources of energy and how they impact the future of our planet. Still, the costs associated with the decommissioning of so-called first generation nuclear plants (those installations built in the early years of commercial nuclear plants development) are extremely high and the solutions to long-term waste disposal are still controversial and open. In sum, when we look inside the black-box of nuclear energy we see several open questions that call for both technical and social analyses, demonstrating how the two are inseparable. For my next project, I am preparing a research proposal on the nuclear decommissioning industry in Europe and in the U.S., with particular attention to local communities that are invested in, and engaged with, the problem of nuclear decommissioning.

5) Finally, what (if any) is your own personal relationship to activism in your research area? You may define activism and research area however you like.

Anti-base activists in La Maddalena gave me hope about new possibilities for public engagement with sociotechnical problems. I have been an activist myself since my youth in Italy. Then, in the mid-1990s, mass party organizations were still the main avenues for political representation and public debates. The political geography of activism in Italy has changed a lot since the Italian political system faced a crisis of credibility pushing many young activists to embrace anti-elitist and anti-establishment views. Until the mid-1980s, Italian political parties were able to elaborate strategies and arguments thanks to public intellectuals who identified themselves with recognizable political positions. Now the situation is more fluid and parties have been emptied of their pedagogical function.

This is especially apparent in controversies about environmental pollution, natural disasters, and the illegal trafficking of toxic waste, which often involve corrupt public officials and/or failures in effective public communication. An overflow of online information exacerbates these problems by making it even more difficult to decipher reliable from unreliable information. As a scholar I am compelled to organize and analyze information, and to collaborate with experts and non-experts to shape fruitful interactions in which public participation is not seen as an intrusion into the “technical” sphere of expertise, and experts’ views are not necessarily interpreted as dismissive, complicit with power elites, or cover-ups.

From my view, grassroots activism increasingly is not just a democratic response to the dysfunctions of political institutions, but also an indispensable source of knowledge production and organization. I believe (with necessary caveats) that this idea extends beyond the Italian setting to other political and environmental contexts.

Wynne, Brian. (1996). “Misunderstood Misunderstandings: Social Identities and the Public Uptake of Science,” in Irwin, Alan and Brian Wynne (Eds.). (1996) Misunderstanding Science? The PublicReconstruction of Science and Technology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 19-46.